The Island of Faith eBook

Rose-Marie’s face was white as she leaned against
the dark wainscoting.

“Minnie Cohen brought the baby in last week,”
she shuddered, “such a dear baby! And Mrs.
Celleni—­she tried so hard! Oh, it’s
not right—­” She was crying, rather
wildly, as she went out of the room.

The Superintendent, left alone at the table, rang
for the stolid maid. Her voice was carefully
calm as she gave orders for the evening meal.
If she was thinking of Giovanni Celleni, his brute
face filled with semi-madness; if she was thinking
of a burned baby, sobbing alone in a darkened tenement
while its mother breathlessly watched the gay colours
and shifting scenes of a make-believe life, her expression
did not mirror her thought. Only once she spoke,
as she was folding her napkin, and then—­

“They’re both very young,” she murmured,
a shade regretfully. Perhaps she was remembering
the enthusiasm—­and the intolerance—­of
her own youth.

III

CONCERNING IDEALS

“Sunshine and apple blossoms!” Rose-Marie,
hurrying along the hall to her own room, repeated
the Young Doctor’s words and sobbed afresh as
she repeated them. She tried to tell herself
that nothing he could think mattered much to her,
but there was a certain element of truth in everything
that he had said. It was a fact that her life
had been an unclouded, peaceful one—­her
days had followed each other as regularly, as innocuously,
as blue china beads, strung upon a white cord, follow
each other.

Of course, she told herself, she had never known a
mother; and her father had died when she was a tiny
girl. But she was forced to admit—­as
she had been forced to admit many times—­that
she did not particularly feel the lack of parents.
Her two aunts, that she had always lived with, had
been everything to her—­they had indulged
her, had made her pretty frocks, had never tried,
in any way, to block the reachings of her personality.
When she had decided suddenly, fired by the convincing
address of a visiting city missionary, to leave the
small town of her birth, they had put no obstacle
in her path.

“If you feel that you must go,” they had
told her, “you must. Maybe it is the work
that the Lord has chosen for you. We have all
faith in you, Rose-Marie!”

And Rose-Marie, splendid in her youth and assurance,
had never known that their pillows were damp that
night—­and for many another night—­with
the tears that they were too brave to let her see.

They had packed her trunk, folding the white dress
and the blue sash—­Rose-Marie wondered how
the Young Doctor had known about the dress and sash—­in
tissue paper. They had created a blue serge frock
for work, and a staunch little blue coat, and a blue
tam-o’-shanter. Rose-Marie would have been
aghast to know how childish she looked in that tam-o’-shanter!
Her every-day shoes had been resoled; her white ruffled
petticoats had been lengthened. And then she had
been launched, like a slim little boat, upon the turbulent
sea of the city!